Palestinian NGOs in Israel


Book Description

One in every six Israeli citizens is a Palestinian Arab. Whilst much has been written about the struggles of Palestinians in the West Bank and on the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian Israelis have often been overlooked. This text charts the history of Palestinian civil society, as well as the repression they have faced from the Israeli state.




Palestinian NGOs in Israel


Book Description

One in every six Israeli citizens is a Palestinian Arab. While much has been written about the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, the struggle for political rights by Palestinian citizens of Israel remains largely unexplored. Shany Payes offers a fresh look at this struggle through analysis of the increasingly growing sector of Palestinian non-governmental organisations. Charting the political history of these associations over the last quarter of a century and running right up to developments during the recent Intifada, she analyses the political repression of Palestinian civil society by the Israeli state and attempts by Palestinian NGOs in Israel to build a civil society in the face of such oppression. 'Palestinian NGOs' is required reading for all those interested in the Israel-Palestine conflict, minority rights and civil society. A lively and orginal contribution to a field in which there is already much interest but where few works of any substance have been produce. I enjoyed the work immensely, and would certainly recommend it warmly both to students and to those with a lively interest in things Palestinian - Philip Robins, St Antony's College, Oxford Provides a fresh insight into political repression of Palestinian civil society by the Israeli state and attempts by Palestinian NGOs to build a civil society in the face of such oppression...The result is a unique piece of work which other academics would be hard pressed to emulate - Gerard Clarke, Centre for Development Studies, University of Wales Swansea




Palestinian Activism in Israel


Book Description

A close description of Amal El'Sana-Alh'jooj's experiences as a Palestinian Bedouin female activist, this book explores Amal's activism and demonstrates that activists' biographies provide a means of understanding the complexities of political situations they are involved in.




Palestine Peace Not Apartheid


Book Description

PRESIDENT CARTER'S COURAGEOUS ASSESSMENT OF WHAT MUST BE DONE TO BRING PERMANENT PEACE TO ISRAEL WITH DIGNITY AND JUSTICE TO PALESTINE




Palestine Ltd.


Book Description

Since the 1993 Oslo Accords, the Occupied Palestinian Territory has been the subject of extensive international peacebuilding and statebuilding efforts coordinated by Western donor states and international finance institutions. Despite their failure to yield peace or Palestinian statehood, the role of these organisations in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is generally overlooked owing to their depiction as tertiary actors engaged in technical missions. In Palestine Ltd., Toufic Haddad explores how neoliberal frameworks have shaped and informed the common understandings of international, Israeli and Palestinian interactions throughout the Oslo peace process. Drawing upon more than 20 years of policy literature, field-based interviews and recently declassified or leaked documents, he details how these frameworks have led to struggles over influencing Palestinian political and economic behaviour, and attempts to mould the class character of Palestinian society and its leadership. A dystopian vision of Palestine emerges as the by-product of this complex asymmetrical interaction, where nationalism, neo-colonialism and `disaster capitalism' both intersect and diverge. This book is essential for students and scholars interested in Middle East Studies, Arab-Israeli politics and international development.




Waste Siege


Book Description

Waste Siege offers an analysis unusual in the study of Palestine: it depicts the environmental, infrastructural, and aesthetic context in which Palestinians are obliged to forge their lives. To speak of waste siege is to describe a series of conditions, from smelling wastes to negotiating military infrastructures, from biopolitical forms of colonial rule to experiences of governmental abandonment, from obvious targets of resistance to confusion over responsibility for the burdensome objects of daily life. Within this rubble, debris, and infrastructural fallout, West Bank Palestinians create a life under settler colonial rule. Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins focuses on waste as an experience of everyday life that is continuous with, but not a result only of, occupation. Tracing Palestinians' own experiences of wastes over the past decade, she considers how multiple authorities governing the West Bank—including municipalities, the Palestinian Authority, international aid organizations, NGOs, and Israel—rule by waste siege, whether intentionally or not. Her work challenges both common formulations of waste as "matter out of place" and as the ontological opposite of the environment, by suggesting instead that waste siege be understood as an ecology of "matter with no place to go." Waste siege thus not only describes a stateless Palestine, but also becomes a metaphor for our besieged planet.




Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine


Book Description

In recent decades, Palestinian heritage organizations have launched numerous urban regeneration and museum projects across the West Bank in response to the enduring Israeli occupation. These efforts to reclaim and assert Palestinian heritage differ significantly from the typical global cultural project: here it is people's cultural memory and living environment, rather than ancient history and archaeology, that take center stage. It is local civil society and NGOs, not state actors, who are "doing" heritage. In this context, Palestinian heritage has become not just a practice of resistance, but a resourceful mode of governing the Palestinian landscape. With this book, Chiara De Cesari examines these Palestinian heritage projects—notably the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee, Riwaq, and the Palestinian Museum—and the transnational actors, practices, and material sites they mobilize to create new institutions in the absence of a sovereign state. Through their rehabilitation of Palestinian heritage, these organizations have halted the expansion of Israeli settlements. They have also given Palestinians opportunities to rethink and transform state functions. Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine reveals how the West Bank is home to creative experimentation, insurgent agencies, and resourceful attempts to reverse colonial violence—and a model of how things could be.




Going Home


Book Description

Winner, Moore Prize for Human Rights Writing In a dazzling mix of reportage, analysis, and memoir, the leading Palestinian writer of our time reflects on aging, failure, the occupation, and the changing face of Ramallah "Few Palestinians have opened their minds and their hearts with such frankness." —The New York Times In Going Home, Raja Shehadeh, the Orwell Prize–winning author of Palestinian Walks, takes us on a series of journeys around his hometown of Ramallah. Set in a single day—the day that happens to be the fiftieth anniversary of Israel's occupation of the West Bank—the book is a powerful and moving record and chronicle of the changing face of his city. Here is a city whose green spaces—gardens and hills crowned with olive trees— have been replaced by tower blocks and concrete lots; where the Israeli occupation has further entrenched itself in every aspect of movement, from the roads that can and cannot be used to the bureaucratic barriers that prevent people leaving the West Bank. Here also is a city that is culturally shifting, where Islam is taking a more prominent role in people's everyday and political lives and in the geography of the city. A penetrating evocation of memory, pain, and place that is lightened by everyday joys such as delightful accounts of shared meals and gardening, Going Home is perhaps Raja Shehadeh's most moving and painfully visceral addition to his series of personal histories of the occupation, confirming Rachel Kushner's judgment that "Shehadeh is a buoy in a sea of bleakness."




The Rise and Fall of Human Rights


Book Description

The Rise and Fall of Human Rights provides a groundbreaking ethnographic investigation of the Palestinian human rights world—its NGOs, activists, and "victims," as well as their politics, training, and discourse—since 1979. Though human rights activity began as a means of struggle against the Israeli occupation, in failing to end the Israeli occupation, protect basic human rights, or establish an accountable Palestinian government, the human rights industry has become the object of cynicism for many Palestinians. But far from indicating apathy, such cynicism generates a productive critique of domestic politics and Western interventionism. This book illuminates the successes and failures of Palestinians' varied engagements with human rights in their quest for independence.




The Arabs in Israel


Book Description